Blood and Bone

Eds Angela Belli, Jack Coulehan

University of Iowa Press, £16.95, pp 224

ISBN 0877456380

Rating:

Why do some doctors write poems? In Poems Before and After Miroslav Holub wrote that a poem arises when there's nothing else to be done, as a last attempt at order when one can't stand disorder any longer: “Although poets are most needed when freedom, vitamin C, communications, laws and hypertension therapy are also most needed, a poem is not one of the last but one of the first things of man.” As a world class poet, immunologist, and citizen of the Czech Republic, Holub is uniquely qualified to comment.

At worst, doctors' poetry is a benign form of self medication, a valve for those who feel creatively underchallenged by the humdrum routine of clinical practice or an alternative to sex, spirits, shrinks, or suicide when the pressure of containing other people's unmet needs as well as one's own becomes too much. At best, it is much more.

It is this sense of doctors meeting their own need for resolution that most marks the anthology Blood and Bone. A collection of poems written by predominantly American physicians and culled from medical journals and literary magazines, the book is above all about what doctoring means to doctors.

Some of the poems shine, like those of Dannie Abse and Rafael Campo. Clear, tight, and crafted, they encapsulate without pathos, melodrama, or self importance moments that speak to people beyond the narrow medical world they inhabit. They use the restricted code we speak not to show off, but playfully and inclusively. These are “human to human” poems, and medicine features only as another sieve through which human consciousness can be filtered.

Others are doctor to doctor poems, self referential, exclusive, and cosy, using words like spinal tap and trochar in a way that is neither explanatory nor metaphorical. Some seem simply to “let it all hang out,” a far cry from the rigour of Carlos Williams and Holub, in whose hands words are a surgical instrument—sparing, assiduous, neat, incisive, and to be used only when all other options have been explored.

But as a collection of imaginative reflections on doctoring, this book will interest doctors in a way it may not move those interested only in the quality of each individual poem. Clinical situations will resonate, and the more exclusive language will not so readily alienate. Some of the therapeutic effects might even rub off on us. Provided, as Holub says, “a poem, which is the poet's modest attempt to put off disintegration for a while, is not regarded as the philosopher's stone, bringing salvation and deliverance to stupefied mankind.”